Alfred Bleikoff won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of the origin of the universe. Bleikoff missed the presentation ceremony in Stockholm, however, preferring to join a crowd of antiwar protesters. He was found the next morning speaking to inmates in a cell about the need for peace lovers to study the sciences. Calling his pacifist work a “meager protest against aggression,” Bleikoff’s campaign eventually caught on and that current war ended. An incurable disease led to him accept an offer of being cryogenically frozen as part of Earth’s first major effort in cryonics. He was frozen in the 1990s and sent adrift in space in a capsule.

“As I stand amid the ruins of a civilization even older than my own, I recall a visit I made to a class of eight-year-olds today. I was staggered to realize that those children – every one of them — know more mathematics than I do! And I am a mathematician! So – what can I teach a world like yours?”